Apple Music has lots of high points and low points. I’ll try to consolidate all of the information gathered during the analysis below.
One of the most prominent high points of the app is its exquisite aesthetics. Every playlist artwork is carefully designed, when they are near each other they create a calm but pleasing layout. Apple obviously took advantage of software/hardware integration for smooth transition animations that they are subtle but gives adequate feedback to user interaction.
By utilizing these aesthetic and animation capabilities, Apple Music transforms viewing lyrics is a standalone and interesting experience in itself. The blurring effects, the ability to scan through the track, subtle background animation and colors are setting the scene for great experience although the same praise cannot be said about MacOS version.
It is not all positive though, there are some settings, such as the current streaming quality is buried to hard-to-find settings page on iOS and iPhone versions.
It is observed that for the app, presenting a good experience for finding what to listen everyday is a quite prominent area. But it is hard to say the app succeeds in this endeavour, while admitting this is not an easy task. All the main pages of the app are trying to compete with each other while following similar strategies.
‘Listen Now’ page has a lot of content that is based on user behaviour. There are a lot of content here that Hick’s Law immediately kicks in. There is ‘made for you’ section with mixed playlists, ‘recently played’ several other shelves with albums and playlists, some radio stations, ‘new releases’, ‘shared’ songs... The list goes on and on and every time I land here I stare at the screen blank for a moment trying to digest what is going on here. I think there are a lot of cognitive load in these pages (main pages) that can be reduced via organizing the information structure and delineating their boundaries better, reducing the overall content to a more meaningful but less.
Like claimed above ‘Browse’ area has a similar structure with bunch of playlists, categories and albums ignoring the user data this time. Again, there are a lot of content here that does little sense when they are randomly listed together. From the beginning Apple Music has some information on the user (onboarding starts with that) but somehow in Browse the app completely ignores what it knows about the user and just throws random stuff to this page. There is clearly no content strategy rather than ‘let’s throw every kind of content we have to this page in a random order’.
I think this is page is one of the lowest points of Apple Music. The ‘content strategy’ problems and Hick’s Law applies here as well but the fundamentals of ‘Radio’ station of the app has some problems.
The first problem user never sees the tracks of the radio, it is simply impossible to see tracks other than the very next one.
